Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Net Neutrality Faces a Number of Threats | MIT Technology Review: "“The status quo ante might be strong enough that it is too scary to mess with it, because all hell would break loose,” Wu says. “I think the whole balance of power is changing on net neutrality, and there is a real danger for cable and phone companies, where if they try to charge Internet firms, they will end up paying instead.”
For those who think neutrality should be enforced by law, there is some good news. Part of Verizon’s argument is that the FCC simply overstepped its authority in writing the rules at all. Earlier this week, in a separate case involving zoning disputes over cell towers, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed solidly in the FCC’s favor and said the commission could define what its jurisdiction consisted of." 'via Blog this'

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Drosselkom: Offline and Online-Protests against ISP Plans to slow down Internet Connections – and for Net Neutrality: "Imagine a car usually driving 50 km/h, but after driving for 1.000 km it is slowed down to 384 meters per hour – it’s functionality is broken. Making matters even worse, Telekom also openly announced, that internet companies can pay them to be excluded from those customer limits. This is already being done with the music streaming service Spotify: their traffic will not be counted for the customer limit – and Spotify will remain available at full speed even when its competitors are slowed down. The market leader is trying to kill the principle of net neutrality – that all bits are created equal. 'via Blog this'

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Skype's ominous link checking: facts and speculation - The H Security: News and Features: "Microsoft should at least document the use of these surveillance techniques and provide users with the option to decline the well-intended security measure.
No further access attempts from Redmond were observed during our latest link-sending tests in Skype. Let's hope that Microsoft has learnt from this debacle and disabled the feature, at least temporarily. This would be a good time to meditate on the problem, think carefully about the costs and benefits of such surveillance features and then contemplate how to implement them properly. Incidentally, similar tests carried out in the Google, Facebook and ICQ chat clients returned no results – which means that no access attempts were registered on the special URLs that were sent via these clients." 'via Blog this'UPDATE 24/5/13: "There’s no evidence that anyone, human or machine, is reading your
confidential messages. There's no evidence that the content of the
messages is being examined at all. Automated scanning of some URLs
within instant messages isn't the same as "reading everything you
write." This is roughly equivalent to what mail servers do when they
check the header information on an incoming message to determine whether
it's spam. That's a legitimate security function, not an invasion of
privacy. You can put that tinfoil hat away, at least for now."

Friday, May 17, 2013

Catch-Up Talk with Blair Levin Yields Some Surprises: "Levin said, “The FCC is becoming more of a political institution and less an expert agency.” Like other D.C. political institutions, he said, the commission is “increasingly caught up in a one-note narrative . . . of self-praise rather than focusing on providing the expertise and analytic agility necessary to adjust programs to provide bandwidth abundance to constituencies it is meant to serve.” In an interview with Telecompetitor on Friday, Levin directed further criticism at the FCC’s self-praise. “I would never invest in a company that had a CEO who behaved that way,” he said." 'via Blog this'

FCC: This is What a Net Neutrality Violation Looks Like | Public Knowledge: "in its Open Internet Order, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provided us with a taste of what may happen (“edge providers” are anyone who creates content like ESPN, Facebook, local governments, and personal websites):“a broadband provider may act to benefit edge providers that have paid it to exclude rivals” (Paragraph 23)“broadband providers may have incentives to increase revenues by charging edge providers, who already pay for their own connections to the Internet, for access or prioritized access to end users.” (Paragraph 24)“Broadband providers would be expected to set inefficiently high fees to edge providers because they receive the benefits of those fees but are unlikely to fully account of the detrimental impact on edge providers’ ability and incentive to innovate and invest, including the possibility that some edge providers might exit or decline to enter the market.” (Paragraph 25)“Fees for access or prioritized access could trigger an ‘arms race’ within a given edge market segment. If one edge provider pays for access or prioritized access to end users, subscribers may tend to favor that provider’s services, and competing edge providers may feel that they must respond by paying too.” (Paragraph 25)“Fees for access or prioritization to end users could reduce the potential profits that an edge provider would expect to earn from developing new offerings, and thereby reducing edge providers’ incentives to invest and innovate.” (Paragraph 26)“if broadband providers can profitably charge edge providers for prioritized access to end users, they will have an incentive to degrade or decline to increase the quality of the service they provide to non-prioritized traffic.” (Paragraph 29)The deal being discussed could cause all of these harms and more. Now is the time for the FCC to step up and preserve an open internet."'via Blog this'

clever/you - thoughts about mobile • ITV, Samsung, and Exclusivity Deals: "exclusivity deals are not, in of themselves, a bad thing (although Trusted Reviews has a great article that offers a counterpoint to this). They can provide cash-limited companies with money to develop interesting and exciting apps. But turning a previously widely available app into an exclusive deal: that’s not so good. Users don’t like it, and I don’t see the benefit for brands…especially if your disgruntled, locked out users start giving you bad press." 'via Blog this'

Monday, May 13, 2013

Managed services – a net neutrality trap? | Internet Policy Review: "Deutsche Telekom argues that managed services are a “separate data stream, independent from the regular best effort internet data traffic.” The SmartTV-DSL bundle Entertain was “no internet service, but a TV service”, the spokesman underlined. “Managed services”, also called “specialised services”, are mainly defined as offered to subscribers only with granted levels of quality of service, but the lines are blurred. By establishing the different “channels” operators regularly try to circumvent network neutrality regimes, several researchers have said. " 'via Blog this'

"A consumer buys an e-book that she downloads onto her computer. When
she opens the e-book she finds that the text is illegible. The provider
confirms there is no fault with the original digital file that was sent
and suggests that the consumer does not have the right hardware. The
consumer confirms that she has downloaded another e-book of the same
format which works well on her computer. She also checks with her
internet service provider that there were no interruptions during the
time of the download. The provider agrees (why would they??!!) that there may have been a
problem with the download (which we refer to as a ‘related service’). We
propose either: [a] the download should be provided with reasonable care and skill. In
this case to get redress the consumer would still have to prove that the
trader did not provide the download service with reasonable care and
skill; OR [b] the digital content should be of satisfactory quality once the
download has taken place. In this case the consumer would have to prove
that the digital content was not of satisfactory quality and that the
problem was not due to their internet connection or hardware. The trader
would then have to provide the consumer with redress regardless of
whether they had provided the related service with reasonable care and
skill."

How, pray, will the ISP satisfy everyone that it has provided an uninterrupted service at the point of download if it does any filtering or throttling at all? It's a net neutrality law! Graham Smith agrees: